Monitoring the vital health signs of a patient typically requires excessive time of medical personnel, or the patient being inconvenienced by being connected by wires to bulky monitoring equipment. For example, in a hospital setting, a nurse has to travel from patient-to-patient in order to determine such vital health signs as temperature and pulse. These account for a substantial amount of the nurse's time and do not provide continuous data. Continuously monitoring vital health signs may require the use of cumbersome and expensive equipment, and may cause the patient discomfort and inconvenience because this equipment has to be connected to the patient thereby limiting the patient's mobility. Both the time expended by medical personnel in obtaining vital health signs of patients, as well as the bulky equipment required, can account for a substantial cost in caring for patients.
It would therefore be desirable to have a simple low cost monitoring instrument which continuously or continually monitors a patients vital health signs and transmits these vital health signs to a remote monitoring unit without the need for the patient being physically connected to the monitoring unit. It would also be most desirous if the monitoring instrument was relatively non-intrusive to the patient and if the monitoring instrument were relatively inexpensive with regard to both the structure of its components and its method of manufacture. In addition, it would be desirable for such a monitoring instrument to have an integral power source and to be so inexpensive that it could be disposed of after its power source expires.